6 Terrible Cameos That Just About Ruined the Movie

#3. Finding Forrester (2000)

The Cameo:

Matt Damon

The Lead Up:

Very rarely can you find an instance where someone turns out to be the worst person on the planet for a job that they're given. For instance, while you may believe that our current President has done a poor job in office, you would have to acknowledge that if he was replaced by Osama Bin Laden, things would get a whole lot worse. Being bad for the job is one thing, but being the worst person for the job is almost unprecedented.

All the cameos up to this point on this list have been distractingly bad, but none featured the worst possible person for the job. Sam Malone was bad, but it probably would have been worse if Spielberg replaced him with Cliff Claven. But Finding Forrester manages to find the exact wrong guy for a cameo, and stick him in the film's most pivotal small part.

This cameo doesn't occur until the end of the movie, by which point you've either left or been sucked into the story. If you're still there, you felt bad when you saw Jamal (Rob Brown) get reprimanded for allegedly plagiarizing the first paragraph of an essay. You feel justice when Jamal is cleared and the jackass professor gets his ass verbally handed to him by Forrester. And the simple joy of watching Forrester ride a bike through New York has just uplifted your heart. The school outfit Anna Paquin wears throughout the film also uplifts your ... heart. Forrester moves back to Ireland and all is well with the world. Until Jamal is asked to meet with Forrester's lawyer, who happens to be ... Will Hunting.

Why it Nearly Ruined the Movie:

At what should be considered the most poignant moment in the movie we get a case of the What the Fucks, not to mention the Why the Fucks and the How the Fucks. Will Hunting shows up to tell Jamal that William Forrester has died and left everything to him. We think Will also tells Jamal that Forrester wrote another book, and asked him to do the foreword before excusing himself to go see about a girl, but we can't remember as our minds are reeling from being forced to acknowledge that the movie we've just been tricked into caring about was just the director of Good Will Hunting doing a lazy retread of his most successful movie.

See if this sounds familiar: A Gus Van Sant directed movie about a poor kid living in the ghetto who turns out to be a closeted genius. He faces resistance from uptight academics, but is helped along by a mentor with a no-nonsense attitude and a beard. Eventually, the mentor helps the boy genius come to terms with his talents.

Films have been considered remakes that had less in common than these two.

Van Sant tries to disguise the similarities by exchanging Will's math genius with Jamal's literary genius, and authentic sounding South Boston accents for meme-spawning approximations of black slang. And it just might have been enough to distract you from the fact that this is basically a lazy Mad Lib of Good Will Hunting if he hadn't gone and tapped Will Hunting himself to deliver the most important news of the movie.

The cameo-fest that is Alice in Wonderland starts when Alice meets the White Rabbit (comedian Red Buttons) and doesn't end until they mercifully roll credits on this two-part miniseries that aired on CBS in December of 1985.

Why it Nearly Ruined the Movie:

This movie ruins the lovable relationship most kids had with Alice in Wonderland. Oh, the child-friendly themes of following strange animals and drinking and eating poorly-labeled foodstuffs is still there. But then another actor or comedian pops up and takes our mind away from the whimsical story by making us go, "Wow, they must be desperate for money to wear that outfit."

Alice may go through the looking glass but we go through the tunnel of the childhood trauma. Mr. Miyagi is a horse, George Jefferson is a mouse, Ringo Starr is a Turtle and dear old Sammy Davis Jr. is a pot-smoking caterpillar.

Worst of all they take a badass like Kojak.

And turn him into this.

Which makes our faces look like this.

#1. Ocean's 12(2004)

The Cameo:

Bruce Willis

The Lead Up:

Danny Ocean's likable crew is tasked with undoing everything they did in Ocean's 11, the only movie from the series that was actually good. As if this isn't unsatisfying enough, they have to accomplish the task by stealing an egg! We wish to God we were kidding.

The plot to steal the egg involves one of the most retarded schemes ever shown on film. Tess (played by Julia Roberts) has to pretend to be ... Julia Roberts. Why? Because Tess (again we'll remind you, played by Julia Roberts) just happens to look like ... Julia Roberts. This unfunny meta-joke is what you'd end up with if Charlie Kaufman's retarded twin brother from Adaptation was a real screenwriter. But the utter ridiculousness of the idea doesn't truly get a running start and kick you in the groin until Bruce Willis shows up playing ... Bruce Willis.

Why it Nearly Ruined the Movie:

In a movie with a bad premise, bad setup and horrific execution (and later a few bad twists) you may think that a bad cameo would be par for the course. Oh how deliciously wrong you would be.

Bruce Willis has a total of two tricks in his acting bag, playing an edgy burnt-out cop and playing a quirky assassin. While these two tricks have given him more money, fame and women than any burnt-out cop or quirky assassin should have, we still like to believe that he wakes up every morning in a cheap motel with a bad hangover yelling at no one in particular to get him two aspirin and his ex-wife on the phone.

In Ocean's 12, Willis and director Steven Soderberg decide to take the character of Bruce Willis in a different direction, making him into a creepy guy that appears to stalk Julia Roberts. It's as if a deranged maniac that knows more about Ms. Roberts than her own parents came bursting into her dressing room.

In addition to being creepy, Willis also sounds like a pussy. It is simply unacceptable for Bruce Willis to utter the phrase, "You're not supposed to fly when you're eight months pregnant" unless he's fighting a female assassin who is pretending to be pregnant in order to conceal a bomb and he's just thrown her out of an airplane at 30,000 feet, and watched her body explode in midair. That is the only scenario in which that line is acceptable coming from Bruce Willis.